Saturday, July 20, 2013

A Rare Victory for Public Higher Education in California

Online education.It was supposed to be the future.And it suddenly had the support of California’s
governor, Jerry Brown, who never supports anything unless he can be sure it’s
popular with the people who count.Outsourcing to companies like Udacity and Coursera, rather than
reinvestment in California’s institutions of higher education, was going to be
the silver bullet, the answer to decades of neglect when not outright hostility
from without by the state, and years of sabotage from within by market-minded
administrators.

So confident was Brown that he tried to
force a deal on UC’s leadership whereby in exchange for increased funding
thanks to November’s Prop 30 victory, UC would have to pledge to devote
significant time and resources to introducing online coursework.Given their efforts to privatise UC piece by
piece, and some of their members’ investments in the for-profit education
sector, it might have been supposed that the Regents would have leapt at such
an offer, but jealous of their policy prerogatives and under pressure from the
campuses, they rejected the deal.

The proof in the pudding was supposed to
be found in the classrooms at San Jose State University, where edX had
partnered with the administration to offer classes jointly with San Jose State
faculty while Udacity ran online courses on campus.This kind of grand experiment, which
Udacity CEO told lawmakers and educators could “change the life of
Californians”, was designed to prove that departments full of tenured faculty,
graduate student employees, classrooms, and in fact entire University
communities, were superficial, and not cost-effective in an era where austerity
is supposedly the newest unproven necessity.

Unsurprisingly, San Jose State faculty
did not take this assault lying down, and
pointed out in a letter that “there is no pedagogical problem in our
department that JusticeX solves”, whereas “the move to [Massive Open Online Courses]
comes at a great peril to our university”.Faculty rightly questioned the quality of a course which functions in
absence of engagement, without the ability to account for classroom diversity
and student experience, and which is based on uniformity of content and
instruction across many universities.

They were joined in their criticism of
what amounted to back-door privatisation by University of California faculty,
with James Vernon, incoming Berkeley Faculty Association co-chair leading the
way in arguing
that MOOCs would quickly turn into “an excuse to not hire real faculty”.

Writing
in the Guardian, Vernon warned
British universities that if MOOCs were embraced by the University of
California, already-beleaguered British universities might be forced to follow
suit in the name of cost-cutting.Ridiculing
the “savings” promised by MOOCs, Vernon noted that “UCOnline, set up with a
$7million loan in 2011, has spectacularly failed to pay for itself, let alone
generate income”.Rather, it would seem,
the introduction of online education is designed to subsidise the for-profit
education sector, which preys on students and public universities alike.

Suddenly, in July, MOOCs are on the
rocks.Vernon pointed out three months
ago that there is already evidence “in Washington
and Virginia...that
underachieving, minority and disadvantaged students fared particularly badly
when they took online classes”.

Now the industry’s own
carefully-designed experiment at San Jose State, implemented with the support
of an enthusiastic administration but without the consent of the University’s
faculty, is being called into question.SJSU
announced that it would “‘pause’ its work with Udacity”, with Provost Ellen
Junn citing “disappointing student performance” as the reason for breaking off
what once promised to be a passionate love affair between university
administrators and education profiteers.

According to Inside Higher Ed, “preliminary
findings from the spring semester suggest students in the online Udacity
courses, which were developed jointly with San Jose State faculty, do not fare
as well as students who attend normal classes”, with the vice-president of the
university’s Faculty Associating remarking caustically that “It’s wise to re-evaluate
and pursue something based on the evidence rather than the advertisement”.

The blended course, which required
participation from SJSU faculty, worked better than the purely online course,
and such courses are still taught entirely by SJSU faculty, with edX material
playing a subsidiary role.I’ve spoken to
faculty doing work in pedagogy within their fields who are sympathetic to
online courses in principle.They say
that it’s common knowledge that students participate, stay up to speed, and
complete online courses at abysmally low rates, and that it is silly to consider
them an answer to the range of challenges facing higher education at public
universities across the country.

It is rare these days to be able to
describe a victory for public higher education in California...the
Governor has been joined by Democratic leadership in declaring an era of
austerity; there is no sign of tuition relief for students at UC and Cal
State; there is little indication of serious, sustained public reinvestment in
the state’s Master Plan; and UC just used a hiring process that would be the
envy of the KGB for its lack of transparency to appoint its new system wide
President.

But I am encouraged by fact that San
Jose State chose to step back from the brink, and acknowledge the fact that the
“old fashioned” idea of a University as a community—a community in which faculty,
staff, and students work together as a team of community members invested in a
space and an enterprise rather than flapping aimlessly like so many
birds-of-passage—might have some merit in it.

Managing university systems like UC and
Cal State is not simple.UC has ten
campuses, assorted national labs, and medical schools, and is home to nearly a
quarter million students and over 200,000 faculty and staff.Cal State operates across 23 campuses and
provides a home for nearly half a million students and over 40,000 faculty and
staff.

But what would we expect?It’s a human enterprise, and people are
complicated creatures.As individuals,
we have complex needs, and as society, we require complicated structures to
address those needs in a manageable, serious, successful, and humane manner.

Would it be easier to ask those hundreds
of thousands of students to stay home and “attend” university on their
laptops?Sure.But as SJSU’s experience suggests, “ease”
doesn’t translate into “success”.And
moreover, those students would miss out on something special that comes from
being a part of an institution and a community devoted to learning and committed
to the public good.And California—a famously
complicated community—would be much the poorer for failing to support such
institutions, and the students and public which they serve.

About Me

I am from Northern California, and am the fifth generation of my family to have lived in the Golden State. Now I live next-door in the Silver State, where I work as an assistant professor of history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. I research and write about colonialism and decolonization in Africa, teach European, African, environmental, and colonial history, and write this blog, mostly about politics, sometimes about history, and occasionally about travels or research. This blog also appears on the website of the Redding Record Searchlight.